Catalogue > At random

The Salton Sea in southern California is a unique ecosystem. In just four years, the water level has fallen by a good half a meter, and with a maximum depth of ten meters you can calculate when it is expected to dry out. And that’s just the global aspect, which has to do with global warming and changes in the local climate. The Salton Sea is also special because the United States tested numerous atomic bombs here in the final phases of World War II and the Cold War – initially in preparation for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, later as training for missions that fortunately never took place. In AMONG THE PALMS THE BOMB, Lukas Marxt and Vanja Smiljani? are particularly interested in this aspect of regional history. The film begins in Utah, where the planes took off and then found their destination in the supposedly secluded area around the Salton Sea. There is a museum in Wendover where you can also see models of “Fat Man” and “Little Boy”, the only two atomic bombs ever used in war, along with a loading pit where the planes were loaded, to which Marxt dedicated a shorter film in 2019. For many years he has been dealing with the situation in southern California, which can be described as extreme in many respects. Intensive agriculture, which relies radically on monocultures, has cast a spell over everything there. Marxt and Smiljani? find out that an alliance has been formed against this backdrop: illegal harvest workers from Latin America seek refuge in Native American reservations. AMONG THE PALMS THE BOMB has local experts explain the landscape and history, and the director is looking for dissenting voices, especially among the tribe of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, who were victims of genocide in the 19th century. Their survivors now recall how many plants that had healing powers and were part of a life with nature once grew around the salty water of the Salton Sea. Now the area belongs to the salt bushes, and beneath the surface ticks the uranium of a Cold War that is about to return. Scary times, someone says. (Bert Rebhandl)

Lukas Marxt (*1983, Austria) is an artist and a filmmaker living and working between Cologne and Graz. Marxt´s interest in the dialogue between human and geological existence, and the impact of man upon nature was first explored in his studies of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Graz, and was further developed through his audio visual studies at the Art University in Linz. He received his MFA from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and attended the postgraduate programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Marxt has been sharing his research in the visual art environment as well as in the cinema context. His works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, 2018), at The Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Belgium, 2018), and at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (Croatia, 2018). His films have been presented in numerous International Film Festivals including Berlinale (Germany, 2017 and 2018), Curtas Vila do Conde (Portugal, 2018), and the Gijón International Film Festival where he receiced the Principado de Asturias prize for the best short film (Spain, 2018). Since 2017, Marxt has spent a considerable amount of time in Southern California, where he has researched the ecological and socio-political structures surrounding the Salton Sea. Vanja Smiljani? (Belgrade, 1986) is a visual and performance artist living and working between Lisbon and Cologne. She concluded the post-master in Artistic research at A.pass, Brussels (2015), MFA at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI), Arnhem (2012), and Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (2019) and got a degree in Fine Arts at the Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa (2009). In her practice she often utilizes the model of performance-lecture as a way to bridge fictitious and experiential universes, comprising technical apparatus, diagrams and sci-fi povera sculptures. Connecting otherwise unparalleled reality systems, Vanja's work attests the foundation of ideologies as alienated regimes, recurring to her own body as a vessel for narration, often shifting between the position of oracle and storyteller.